American Theatre is Still in the Grips of Our Sacred Monsters

(Listen to the podcast recording of this post HERE)

Chief theatre critic of the New York Times, Jesse Green, published a potent article today entitled “Is It Finally Twilight for the Theatre’s Sacred Monsters?” I encourage you to take a few minutes to read the article and then come back here (I’ve gifted the article, so you can read it for free at that link, regardless of whether you have a subscription or not).

Quite something, isn’t it? By the end, he seems to come around to the only moral conclusion possible: that people do not deserve to be abused for any reason, and especially not through a process of creation that requires such vulnerability on the part of its participants to be done well:

“But mostly the “different times” excuse is insufficient because it fails to acknowledge how much of what we find inevitable in the theater was actually not; the inevitability was the handiwork of surprisingly few people and can, with diligence, be disassembled. Indeed, it must be if we are to make any progress — not just in terms of quality-of-life issues but in terms of the quality-of-art issues a critic supposedly cares about most.”

But he gets there through a rather circuitous route, and one that belies his own complicity in upholding these norms; there is much that I think we as a theatre community should take issue with. So come with me as we journey through Green’s developing understanding of just how significant the problem is…and his missteps along the way.

Great Men (As Told By a White Man)

Green starts with a retrospective of the development of American acting in the 20th century, accurately tracing the roots (Stanislavski) and at least one of the branches in Lee Strasberg and the other founders of the Group Theatre and Actors Studio. Green’s first misstep comes as he attempts to imagine what would have happened if these men had been working today: “Now, he’d most likely be brought up on charges before Equity, the actors’ union, and fired or forced to undergo anger management training. And that would surely be just.”

I recently saw a production of Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, and perhaps it’s just me, but there’s something about the phrasing of that last sentence that reminds me a lot of the Act 2 character Steve, played by the same actor who plays Karl Lender in Act 1. Steve is a white guy who doesn’t handle being put on the defensive well, and something about Green’s use of the word “surely” carries that same impression. For the next few paragraphs it seems like he is fully on board, talking about the conversations that are happening in the professional theatre industry right now, until we reach this gem of a paragraph:

“Still, if we are approaching a Great Man Götterdämmerung — if those monsters, some of them superb at what they do, are finally beginning to face the music — we’d better look closely at the tune. What are we losing when we banish them? What are we losing if we don’t?”

First, the use of the term Götterdämmerung is telling. Perhaps he chose it because it is the title of the last of Wagner’s Ring cycle, but for those who do not know, it is a German translation of the Norse phrase Ragnarök, familiar to modern audiences thanks to the Marvel film that bears the same name. For those who aren’t familiar, the Norse term refers to a prophesy that a war between the gods will result in the burning, drowning, and renewal of the world. And in case you’re unaware, Norse mythology and terminology is a favorite of white supremacists in the United States. Is Green among their number? I don’t claim to know. But of all the images he could have evoked to discuss the transition away from these “Great Men” as he calls them, this seems an odd and intentional choice.

Additionally, when someone who is in the majority (white and male for sure, in this case) talks about the equivalent of “burning it all down,” my experience tells me that they often use that language at least in part sarcastically. Phrased another way, the above sounds an awful lot like “Fine, burn it all down, but don’t you want to know what you’re going to end up burning with it?” I’ve heard almost that exact phrase quite a few times, all from men like Green.

If It Was So Bad…

Next, Green moves on to talking about the transition of this horrific behavior to the musical theatre realm, focusing heavily on Jerome Robbins, the man behind the concept, direction, and choreography of West Side Story. His descriptions of Robbins’ cruelty is appropriately stark, though it is his expressed confusion about why he was so admired that stands out:

“But here’s the bizarre thing, though we see it repeated everywhere in theater, now as then: Many of his dancers, most of his collaborators and nearly all of his audiences (who in those days knew little of the backstage truth) admired Robbins anyway. They were able to put his behavior to the side, even including his having named names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1950….Perhaps they believed, at least in this case, that greatness was inseparably joined to awfulness; you couldn’t have one without the other.”

Perhaps it is unsurprising that Green is unable to understand this dynamic, having never been on the receiving end of what is essentially societal Stockholm Syndrome. That this is the reality expressed clearly by Chita Rivera, who Green quotes as saying, “If dancers aren’t pushed to their limits, they would not be as good as they can. They’re the vessel, not the creator.”

This immediately reminds me of language used in the conservative evangelical church: women are “helpmeets” to their husbands, the men are the “head” of the family and they are the “vessel” for the man’s children and need fulfillment. This language has led to immense harm in that world as well as the theatre, a more full picture of which we can see in the recent report about sexual assault/abuse/harassment in the Southern Baptist Convention. Five paragraphs are dedicated to Rivera’s perspective that abuse just happens and people today need to stop being upset about being yelled at, with one short paragraph and a hyperlink being given to Patti LuPone’s experience of the supposedly “nicest of the great men,” Hal Prince. Allow me to quote from David Marchese’s October 2019 interview with LuPone, which is where Green’s hyperlink points to (the interviewer’s question is bolded):

““In the case with Hal Prince, what happened was so scarring that I said, “I will never work with this man again.” And I never did.

Can you tell me what happened with Hal Prince? Well, it was a rehearsal with the New York company of “Evita” after he had just opened the L.A. company of the show. He started the rehearsal with a bullhorn turned up to 10, saying, “The L.A. company is better than you are, and now rehearse!” Then maybe 10 minutes into it, he accused me of changing blocking. I went, “No, you changed it in previews.” An argument — this humiliation — ensued for the entire rehearsal. I ended up in a fetal position in my dressing room, crying my eyes out. Stage management came in, and I said: “Why didn’t you defend me? The changes were in the prompt book.” They were Hal Prince’s men, the stage management, and one of them said, “Oh, honey, he does that to all his leading ladies.” As if it were acceptable. That was a form of bullying, but you just go, O.K. I never understood it.

…What Hal Prince did has never left me. It did many things besides humiliate me. It diminished my status in the company as the leading lady. He treated me like a stupid chorus girl. It was so demoralizing and defeating. He actually said, “Now, who’s going to win this argument?” I said, “You, because you’re the director.” He said: “That’s right. Now sing.” “Evita” was the thing that shot me to stardom, but when I say I didn’t like the experience, that’s one of the reasons. It was hard as hell.”

Strange, isn’t it, that five paragraphs are dedicated to a woman criticizing others for speaking up against verbal abuse, and only one short paragraph to a woman calling it for what it is, even from “the nicest of the Great Men?” Again, I assume no maliciousness on the part of Green, but it is another example of his struggle to let go of his inherent and internal biases as a white man who has benefitted from the industry created by these “Great Men.”

The World Without Great Men

And finally we land on Green’s point that began with the idea of the “Great Man Götterdämmerung”:

“In other words, without monstrousness, we do not have what we have been conditioned to think of as the theater itself.”

Take a moment and let that sink in. I had to. Because there are a multitude of issues with this, and I may only scratch the surface.

First of all, “the theatre” does not belong to anyone. It doesn’t belong to white people and it doesn’t belong to Western culture. Monstrousness does not define “the theatre” that I create or that those I know create. Now, you might argue that what he meant was “the theatre industry,” which may be true, but that’s clearly not what he wrote, and if he did in fact mean to refer to the industry, this faux pas is classic white guy, and I know because as a white person assigned male at birth, I’ve made similar mistakes in the past. What he is doing is centering the version of theatre that these men (and complicit women) were responsible for creating as though it is “the theatre,” the default setting. It’s something white colonialism does well, claiming all of something that they are just recent arrivals to; see our treatment of indigenous populations for plenty more examples.

Second, there is a pushing of blame away from people like himself with the phrase: “…we have been conditioned…” Men like Jesse Green, Ben Brantley, Charles Isherwood, and all of their predecessors were and are actively part of that conditioning. It would have been far more honest and accurate to say “we have conditioned ourselves,” but instead he pushes off blame to an unknown force that is conditioning people like him.

Third and finally, the entire premise is unsubstantiated. The idea that, “if it weren’t for x, we wouldn’t have y,” is demonstrably true in pretty much one instance: the biological birth of another human being. If it weren’t for my mother and father, I would not exist. But an idea, a creation…it does not require contribution of DNA in order to exist. Take patents and copyright; they exist for two reasons. First, to protect someone’s creation from being stolen without compensation, but also to adjudicate who came up with an idea first.

There is no way to prove that something just like West Side Story (and perhaps better) would not have come about without abusive behavior, and in fact, Green seems to admit this just a few paragraphs later in the last third of the article:

“…for every great artist like Robbins or great show like “West Side Story,” there are probably at least as many we never got to see, or that never got written, because Robbins and “West Side Story” took up so much of the limited cultural space available. In so doing they defined and hardened our idea of what is worthy of that space, furthering the cycle of exclusion.”

I Guess, If We Have To

This final part of the article feels in many ways as though it was written by a different person, or perhaps written later and tacked on at the end. It mostly rings morally valid in that it is supportive of the idea that nobody deserves to be treated this way, even for “great art,” but even here Green shows that he still can’t say that without demonstrating that he is one of the people the current system was built to benefit.

His coverage of Karen Olivo’s public criticisms of Scott Rudin and the broader Broadway industry gets at least as much real estate as Rivera’s misguided views did earlier in the article. His acknowledgement of the lost “opportunity cost” as discussed above is important and valuable. But much like a competitive gymnast; the vault is only worth that much if you can stick the landing. Green doesn’t.

First, the assertion that “the inevitability [of the abuse] was the handiwork of surprisingly few people and can, with diligence, be disassembled” may be technically true, but it ignores one key fact: those “few people” trained and influenced millions of others and are still influencing them today. Green’s focus is myopic; he can really only see what is close to him. Professional and commercial theatre in NYC, perhaps regional theatres. It ignores the thousands of community theatres, school theatre programs, and collegiate theatre programs that have all been influenced by this toxicity and abusiveness.

I started this blog because of my firm belief that the field of theatrical directing is broken, and it is broken because of the influence of these men and the way that they upheld white, capitalist, colonialist, misogynistic ideas and were rewarded for it. I see it every time I work with an actor who is scared to make a choice, who thanks me for not yelling at them, or who cries when I tell them that I understand they’re running late, it’s okay, to drive safely and we’ll see them when they get to rehearsal. I see it when designers are scared to offer their thoughts, or stage managers raise their voice because that’s what they’ve seen others do.

Now, he’s not wrong, we have to “disassemble” it, but a) he makes it sound far simpler than it is and b) ignores the work that is already being done by women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, and disabled folks to make these changes and have these conversations. A simple assertion at the end of an article that can’t even condemn abuse with a full voice is not enough.

But here’s where Green doesn’t just stumble, he fully falls on his rear end after the vault:

“But let’s make them the end of the line; it will not be a net loss to the culture if the spaces such men occupied, and turned into gilded niches from which to demand obedience and veneration, are vacated now. I cannot say with assurance that new occupants will create works as flattering to my taste as the old ones did, but perhaps they will change and amplify my tastes. That’s a good thing, and so is this: In trying to get our attention, they probably won’t throw a chair.”

The language Green chose here shows us that he isn’t very sure of what he’s writing. Why is it “not a net loss” instead of “a net gain”? How different would it be if the second sentence read, ”I look forward to the work that the new occupants will create; it will likely be new and different and will challenge, change, and amplify my tastes"? Heck, why even talk about his own tastes at all, as though they are the metric by which all theatrical work should be measured? Again, it centers him, as a white man, in this conversation which ultimately isn’t at all about white men like him, but about those who have been abused by “Great Men” that people like him venerated until enough people screamed out in pain that they had to pay attention.

In Conclusion

The fact that Green chose a question for his title is appropriate; he is clearly not ready to proclaim any of this as a full-throated statement or proclamation of belief. The issue is that he chose to do his homework in the public sphere, centering himself in a conversation that ultimately isn’t about him.

From the earliest days of storytelling, storytellers have always had a reason to tell stories, whether to spark wonder, protect and pass on oral history, to entertain, to warn, etc. What abusers like Robbins, Strasberg, Stanislavski, and the like did was make it about the individual (themselves) more than about the community. They may have said otherwise, but that’s the only reason someone mistreats others so horribly, is because you see yourself as more important than they are. And ultimately, Green’s article is more about him and coming to terms with the reality that he has been complicit in a system that has harmed millions of people than it is about the system. And while I’m glad that he is doing this work, maybe this one should have stayed in the drafts.